The truth will set you free.
Sounds simple on screen, but to fully grasp the extent of this single sentence, we need to look deeper.
First, did you know that the phrase comes from the Bible? In John 8:32, Jesus says: “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” It’s frankly remarkable how many modern-day proverbs come from the Bible without people knowing it. What’s less surprising is that most of them actually come from – who would’ve thought – the Book of Proverbs.
While this is arguably the highest meaning of truth, there’s more to the matter than its Christian origins.
In fact, there are other things which can (at least claim to) set one “free”. I will address one of them next, as it’s rather popular in my circles.
Popularized in his book and podcast, Jocko Willink’s mantra “discipline equals freedom” has gained a lot of traction in the past ten years. Discipline is a virtue, and without controlling yourself, you have no hope of controlling your environment. This is not a new or unique idea and can be applied to a variety of contexts as well. In my professional field, cybersecurity, there’s a similar phrase popularized by Troy Hunt and Scott Helme: hack yourself first.
In other words, get your ducks in a row before going on the offensive.
However, discipline should be downstream from truth. When you aim for truth, you will find out what matters (i.e. what is real), and only then can you exercise your agency upon it. If you focus only on discipline but apply it without the proper North Star, you will drive yourself to ruin.
Aiming for the truth
Like many good and proper things in life, you must work to get to them. Truth will not be handed to you on a silver platter and what’s worse, it’s your own mind, your own ego, that might be the biggest blocker.
I know because I have been guilty of this and it is something I constantly have to check myself for.
This is the epistemic side of truth, and within it lies a double trap.
We subconsciously want our reality to correspond with our beliefs. Overcoming this cognitive bias takes tremendous effort and humility. It’s not easy to admit that your prior beliefs were wrong. Accepting truth costs you everything you’ve done and built on your previously adopted version of reality.
Just think how hard a time people have changing their minds on the simplest of things, even if the overwhelming facts are staring right at them. Learning to challenge yourself is an enormously agency-enhancing skill.
One might even think oneself quite clever to realize that. And here comes the second trap.
Valuing critical thinking can very easily turn into challenging the narrative just because. Contrarianism is intellectually seductive and is another way to feed the ego. This is where diehard conspiracy theorists fall off the cliff.
While the past decade or so has taught me that “conspiracy theories should be called spoiler alerts”, still believing that only you have the eyes to see what the sheep cannot is an uncanny spiral that will make you just as blind in the end.
Truth frees you from manipulation precisely because manipulation requires some distortion of reality. Propaganda, scams, ideological capture, advertising, social signaling and even one’s own rationalizations all work similarly by inserting a false model between the person and the world.
Conspiracy theorists, in the most deranged sense of the term, drown in false positives. To them, everything is manipulation, so in the end nothing is really true.
Truth-seeking is easy when the evidence confirms our position. Exactly the same way as supporting freedom of speech is easy when it is our speech that’s getting supported. Both principles must hold up when facing the negative: truth can run against our existing beliefs; free speech must extend to speech we disagree with, too. If we can’t pass that test, then we don’t actually care about truth or freedom of speech.
But remember: protecting freedom of speech doesn’t create an obligation for others to listen. Commitment to truth doesn’t obligate you to disclose everything. Which leads us to…
The inversion
To be truthful is to be honest, and honesty, to me, at least, is one of the main virtues a man can have. C.S. Lewis points out that we (in the Christianized West) tend to live our lives as if there’s a universal standard we should adhere to1. He calls this the Law of Human Nature, or the Moral Law. We might not consciously think that there’s such a Law, but that doesn’t change the fact that we, for example, expect rather high levels of honesty from each other. If someone acts dishonestly, especially repeatedly, we dislike that person and distance ourselves from him as if he has broken a serious Law. He becomes a criminal in a social sense.
We inherently know all this, yet we lie. In fact, sometimes it’s imperative that we do!
Despite the Law of Human Nature holding us together on a societal level, extreme honesty is viewed as socially awkward or even rude behavior. A white lie here and there is a social lubricant, but it needs to be applied very carefully lest it snowball into something far worse.
As a father, I also know how tempting it is to lie to little children. However, I’ve come to the opinion that it’s probably better in the long run to avoid that as well and instead redirect the conversation.
“Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.” I think Dr. Peterson was onto something when he wrote that chapter2. Children learn by mimicking, so teaching them to be honest and take responsibility from an early age is infinitely better than lying your way out of a situation to make your kids put on their clothes faster to avoid being late from daycare.
Moving on to military and cybersecurity contexts, one important concept that gets hammered into our heads from the start is OPSEC: operational security. Knowing what information to withhold and from whom is of extreme importance. Failure to adhere to OPSEC principles can lead to anything from business-collapsing consequences to national security threats.
Secrecy, or at least anti-transparency, is sometimes needed to benefit society as a whole. Unfortunately, this leads us right back to conspiracy theories, manipulation and worse.
But this thought exercise can lead to even darker depths.
“All warfare is based on deception.”3 This is generally accepted and makes sense even to those not familiar with war theory, as similar logic could be applied to any old board game too. As long as the rules of the game are not broken, it’s acceptable, to a certain degree, to deceive. Here’s where this gets inconvenient:
“War does not transform men; it returns them to their native purpose. War is the natural state of males.”4
These are the words of René Quinton, a highly decorated WWI veteran. So, if all warfare is based on deception, and war is the natural state of males, are males then inherently deceptive?
Although both statements were written by wiser men than me, I believe this if-this-then-that thought exercise is ultimately futile. The essence of war changes as you move from the strategic level down to the tactical, and ultimately down to the individual. War is a socially acceptable form of chaos and lies, at least when it is Just War, and thus should not be seen as proof of the non-existence of the Law of Human Nature.
War on truth: honesty in the disinformation era
Looking at our civilian context, make no mistake, online discourse is an adversarial space, too. There are several factors which are muddying the information waters:
- More than half of all web traffic is generated by bots.
- Scamming has been industrialized by organized crime. Now fueled by human trafficking and powered by AI, next to be fully offloaded to AI agents.
- Deepfake and synthetic video generation are becoming almost indistinguishable from the real thing. One company claims 48% of people who spoke live with their AI video model thought it was a real human – and this was just their “Lite” version.
- The UN and the EU are of the same mind: online discourse must be controlled, not free. The Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom, in its “Cybersecurity scenarios 2035”, forecast similar things in all four of their future scenarios (my breakdown here).
- Australia is once again leading the Orwellian charge, this time pushing for legislation that would enable their government to, among other concerning things, create an unlimited number of fake social media accounts to influence people.
So, governments and criminals alike believe that the average citizen doesn’t have the necessary level of media literacy, and both groups aim to capitalize on that in their own way.
I believe personal freedom and responsibility should extend to the creation and consumption of digital information as well. Maybe I’m in the minority, but as Bruce Schneier wrote two decades ago, “Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy.”
One of the best ways to uphold truth in this era is to speak it, honestly. Disinformation should be combated with truth, not censorship. But remember not to confuse honesty with an obligation to disclose everything.
Misinformation and disinformation (and their retarded newspeak cousin, malinformation) can themselves be used as weaponized labels, and we should be aware of that. Truth can be costly, but it is worth pursuing, even if it is labeled something else at first. The easy road is to accept whatever is presented to you as truth. The hard, narrow path is to cultivate the skill of seeking the truth, even when it contradicts your existing worldview.
By being consistently truthful, you’re improving not just your own character (which will lead to all sorts of secondary and tertiary benefits as well), but also your reputation as someone who can be trusted. Why lie for short-term personal gain, when the truth elevates you and society in the long-term?
The truth will set you free. It sounds so simple on screen, but the deeper you look, the more challenging and rewarding it gets.
Finally, as sung by the legendary Johnny Cash,
What’s done in the dark will be brought to the light.
Referenced books:
- Lewis, C. S. (2001). Mere Christianity. HarperOne. (Original work published 1952) ↩︎
- Peterson, J. B. (2018). 12 rules for life: An antidote to chaos. Allen Lane. ↩︎
- Sun Tzu. (2011). The art of war (L. Giles, Trans.). Arcturus Publishing. ↩︎
- Quinton, R. (2025). Maxims on war (E. Maxwell III, Trans.). Imperium Press. (Original work published 1930) ↩︎
